In Spring 2023, 2 friends and I embarked on an early-season ski mountaineering expedition in the Alaska Range. We skied perfect snow and encountered no other travelers during our 14 bitterly cold days on the Southwest Fork of the Kahiltna Glacier. Here, under the midnight sun and the shadow of Sultana, I was forced to confront my relationship with risk, isolation, and the ghost of my dead brother in the shape of a lone raven.
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“The chance emergence of the island was nothing. Remember this. Its emergence was nothing. But its persistence and patient accumulation of stature were everything. Only by relentless effort did it establish its right to exist.”
- Michener
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Everyone said April was too early for the central Alaska Range. “The coldest I’ve ever been in my life,” reflected one Everest summiteer. We were warned to stay fairly low in elevation or suffer. We worried everything we had would freeze, including our unsuspecting toes. But the emailed images from Beau Fredlund, Montana-based skier and snow wizard, danced in my mind. Despite the long history of climbing and skiing in the range, there was still some adventure to be had. Outside of the trade routes and classics, there were plenty of unskied peaks and isolated glaciers available to searchers. As we’ve long proven, my best friend Jonny Morsicato and I are equal parts dumb and tough, so we began planning the expedition, luring our friend Mitchell Quiring away from a historic Sierra snowpack to come shoot photos and video. Mitch is a rare breed, able to do everything Jonny and I set our sights on – with a heavy cinema camera and an armful of lenses weighing down his pack! We booked tickets to Anchorage and began the exhaustive planning, packing, and training.
Already tired from the standard luggage haul through airports, hotels, and shuttles, we hopped into the Go Purple van driven by Gary Moody, perhaps the world’s most frequent commuter between Anchorage and Talkeetna. On the 3-hour drive, Gary crushed us in his rigged game of Alaska trivia before showing mercy and dropping us at the legendary Talkeetna Air Taxi, a storied bush plane operation run by the equally storied climber and pilot Paul Roderick, who has flown expeditions into the Alaska Range for over 30 years. After a quick repack, flight safety briefing, and conditions discussion with the staff (thanks, Heidi and Courtney!), we flew in on April 7th with the intention of landing on the upper Yentna Glacier, a largely unexplored drainage beneath the behemoth Mount Russell. There was only one problem: as we flew closer, we could see that the Yenta was dry as a bone. With a quick in-air audible, we flew east and selected a small pocket fork of the mighty Kahiltna Glacier, where Paul gave us a good look at the basin before swooping in and landing with practiced ease. 5 minutes later, our bags were on the glacier and Paul was gone, leaving us with a cheeky “See you in a few weeks… maybe.” At the confluence of Denali, Sultana, and Begguya, the 3 major peaks of the range, we wouldn’t see another human for the next 14 days.
All of the warnings about April were, of course, accurate. We quickly assembled our expedition tent and built a 5-star kitchen using a Hyperlite Pyramid and ice blocks, then stacked skis and unfurled sleeping pads while gazing in awe at the incredible lenticular clouds building over Denali (we would later hear from the NPS rangers that these were the finest lenticulars many of them had ever seen over their long tenures in Alaska).
Then the cold arrived. Everything froze, and we spent the first night shivering in our -20 sleeping bags, wearing every layer we had, moving our numb fingers and toes at intervals while wondering what we had gotten ourselves into. The initial 72 hours were concerningly frigid, and the mercury didn’t break zero for nearly a week. Much of the discussion centered on hypotheticals – would we rather be in Hawaii with our girlfriends? Or, while boiling my frozen contact case, “How amazing would a salmon burger taste right about now?” The answers, predictably, were complicated and utterly moot. Daytime, meanwhile, was spent in search of the sun. Coming into sharp focus on some unnamed face, I often found myself wondering how far stretched the chasm between my current situation and the comprehension of the various people in my life. What about my own understanding, of both myself and my shifting, often contradictory motivations? I suspected the gaps would dwarf even the largest crevasse.
On the heels of a windy exploratory day on the SE shoulder of Sultana, we started ticking off the aesthetic lines staring at us from every angle. Jonny led us through the small icefall guarding “Camp Peak,” aka unnamed 8079, and I charged up the chute through chalky, stable snow. Topping out onto a rock-ribbed cornice, we were rewarded with our first view of the lower Kahiltna, a maze of yawning crevasses and ominous peaks tumbling down from the crown of the continent.
We turned to look back down at the couloir below us, 1500 feet of snow tilted up to 50 degrees, with a rather distracting view of Sultana in the windshield. Clicking into bindings, Jonny dropped first, whooping and hollering all the way to the apron. Mitch and I followed in sequence, leaving turns in a likely unskied couloir, “In the Light,” mere miles from Denali.
The Alaska Range is perhaps where I finally stopped feeling like an imposter. Most nights, as the sun refused to die, I could hardly believe our position on the map, our commitment to the mountains around us, and the realization of just how special and rare an opportunity we had been given.
I also felt a new, strange feeling in this harsh land; for the first time ever, I was certain I had earned this, through sweat and toil and a long decade of following my heart. It no longer mattered that I grew up in the desert or made my first ski turn at 22, or that every setback and injury had made me question my path into a life shaped by mountains. My mentor Timothy Tate, psychotherapist and mystic based in Bozeman, had led me through “the blue door” to address my own questions about this remarkable course I could never have plotted for myself. Under the shadow of Sultana, I was finding my clearest answers yet.
Following several days of excellent powder skiing on the southern rim of the basin, we were forced into retreat by the only major storm of our trip, a 60-hour barnburner that brought in well over a foot of cold, dry snow. Winds made it difficult to calculate the true snowfall, but we knew we would have to be careful the next few days out. The storm snow began to settle, and we’d had our fill of reading and Rummy, so we set our sights again on the fearsome slopes of Sultana, 17402. With the temps and conditions, we had little chance and no intentions of reaching the summit, but several sensational chutes sliced down its shoulders, and we elected to first ski a SE facing couloir off the French Ridge. Here, the ascent plates earned their keep, and we wallowed through chest-high snow for hours to where the chute met the ridge. As we prepared to transition, Sultana came alive, unleashing a serac far above and right of us. The glacial meteor tumbled down the face, nearly half a mile away, booming and reverberating through the rock walls of “Trampled Under Foot.” We skied deep, soft powder at nearly 50 degrees, skipped over the lower bergschrund, and roped up for the cold walk home.
Alaska was also the longest single exercise in trust of my mountain career, a 2-week commitment to only each other; we didn’t really have a choice. Alongside the many small things that make life in the big mountains difficult and dangerous (lack of water, extreme cold, remoteness), the objective danger of these peaks exists on a scale none of us had ever before encountered. We were reminded of this in sobering fashion halfway through the trip, on the Southeast Ridge of Sultana.
While ascending a hooked chute that had ripped post storm, we got sucked into the increasingly technical climbing on firm snow and 50+ degree ice, failing to note the isolated wind slab feature to our east. Seeing the vista behind us, Mitch scooted over to the lip of the couloir to shoot, then proceeded to climb upward to where Jonny and I had perched on a safe rock band. From above him, we watched the slab trigger in one swift snap, breaking 6 inches deep, 20 feet wide, and running 100 feet directly onto Mitch, who was caught and carried 20 feet before digging in and radioing up that he was fine. I admired his stolid reaction to a close call of this scale; would I be able to show the same calm and poised strength had I almost taken the big slide? After gathering ourselves, we skied the long, firm “Lemon Line” in intervals, making careful turns through the debris field that had built higher with Mitch’s slide. The next day brought another storm, and we caught up on calories while watching Lord of the Rings in our tent, warm and fed for what felt like the first time on the trip.
Below the summit of Peak 8450, I tied in and strapped crampons to my boots, finding the centering peace that comes with the seriousness of a rope. On lead, I inched higher, tunneling my way toward an unknown summit ridge while Jonny and Mitch shivered below. The snow steepened above 65 degrees and I slowed my breathing, standing high above a crack in the glacier and looking in vain for some way to protect a fall. Committing to the steepness, I reached up with my pole, sweeping away the thin veil of storm snow and planting my left crampon in the endless facets, kicking my right foot into the hard rock and alpine ice. I stepped left and dug through the cornice sweeping over me like some melting, Daliesque wave, feeling my hands punch through into vast nothing: the knife edge ridge on the other side dropped 3000 feet to the valley below.
I anchored myself to the firm snow before radioing the news down to Jonny and Mitch, who quickly tagged a sub-summit on the ridge and basked in the glorious sunlight. Transitioning to skis, I noticed a strange movement along the shade line. A raven, the first living being I had seen all trip, swooped on the warm updraft off the ridge, carving the sky as clouds parted for the setting sun. I was stunned; since the unexpected death of my brother Israel in 2016, I had encountered the Raven at many of the most important moments of my life, and I basked in its calming presence. Alone and losing heat, I carefully inched my way down the face, skiing across the gap and joining my friends for an incredible descent of the upper snowfields. Near the lower apron, we spied a bus-sized bridge frozen solid across two gaping crevasses. We transitioned again and hustled to the top as the light left the valley, then made turns on this bridge in the sky, feeling the living cliffs dropping away to eternity on both sides. Maybe this was the closest I would ever be to that bird.
Later, while we boiled snow and warmed our hands, Jonny told me that the night before, he had dreamt I fell into a crevasse, and had spent the day terrified of my potential fate. In that moment, standing in the kitchen tent, I felt appreciation for Jonny in a new light. For nearly a decade, we have tied our prospects together, and every great summit of my life has been alongside the finest climbing partner I will ever know. He understood intuitively that I wouldn’t have wanted to hear about the dream before skiing across the bridge, and knew of my superstitious bond with the raven. I imagined myself breaking through and falling into the maw of the glacier, where I would be chewed for hundreds of years and spit out as silt and sand to join the great egress. I wondered where the ravens of the Alaska Range fell when they died.
We skied a final day, lapping exquisite powder on a massive north face not far from home, and cooked a gourmet and extravagant multi-course meal to celebrate our successful foray (OK, it was instant ramen and fried gnocchi, with oil scraped from our frozen olive block, but you take what you can get out there!). The next morning, with camp packed away into 9 duffle bags, we waited in the sun for our pickup, embracing the warmest temps we’d felt since leaving the lower 48. Hearing the droning motor of the Otter, we stood and waved in our pilots Will and Asa, who landed with expert precision and hopped out to give us a hand with loading. With all aboard, the plane drew in a massive breath and the propeller whirred back into motion, blurring faster than my eyes could possibly calculate. Lift was achieved instantly, and soon we soared over the crest of the great range, flying high above our small glacial home. What scale! The black-ribbed peaks stood proud and jagged, buffeting us with crosswinds as we left the embrace of the range and soon found the tundra. Far below, streams left the snouts of the vast glaciers and braided together to begin their long journey seaward, weaving through alder thickets and the low, stunted forests braving the edge of the alpine. Seeing snow machine tracks on the lowland hills, the reality of life outside the glacier came roaring back to my consciousness. I felt a great sadness overcome me, as if I were breaking a rule only I knew about. Of course, I could never belong here; like everything else, I was just passing through.
I awoke sweating and breathing hoarsely, pawing around for my glasses as light broke through the tent. Reaching off the edge of the bed, I felt myself falling and falling until I hit the floor of our hotel room in Anchorage. Life suddenly felt much more complicated, and I tried to shut out the intrusion of thoughts about all the things that make existence so difficult; money and meaning could wait just a bit longer. Staring at the crack in the window, I begged it to change back, to be a tent wall shaking in the wind for one more frigid sleep. I again thought of the raven, flying above the shadows into a place I couldn’t possibly know, and I stared into the light that would not yield, laying awake until we slipped out for breakfast and coffee. On the plane that night, sprawled across the middle seat while traversing time zones, I dreamt that one day, I too would fly free.
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June 2021
Israel,
I am so mad that you will always be 34. But then again, I thought you were going to die in my hotel room in 2013, so maybe I should be grateful you made it a few more years. You’d been drinking for nearly a week straight, and I came home every night to a suite that smelled like death. First, I’d check your pulse. Then, I’d throw open the curtains and wonder just how you had them closed so tightly when my hotel room looked out over San Diego and the Pacific Ocean, the horizon disappearing every night in a splash of gold and blue as the boats came in to safe harbor and the sounds of the city wafted out until the wind and the storms and the salt eroded them away.
I was too young to understand. But I was old enough to feel pain. Apparently, so were you. What were you running from? Somehow, I never knew, could never look beyond my own self in those years. I used to wear sweaters and slacks and a gold watch, pretending to be something I’m not. It felt like a costume, but I could never forget the burning shame when I went to dinner with Hannah’s family, at a restaurant I couldn’t afford, and the host made a scene about my attire until Chuck tipped him and he quieted down pretty quickly. I wish you could have had a dinner like that before you died, but not because the food was amazing — because you would have laughed and broken all their rules, ordering your steak well done and putting your elbows on the table.
You know what? Fuck ‘em. I’d pour out all the fancy wine and $25 side dishes of cheesy spinach to have you back for one second. I’d write your name in sharpie on their stupid white tablecloths, because I know the rules now so I know how to break them, too. The only rule I can’t break is the only one none of us can. I can’t bring you back. I’ll never not be sad about that. But that’s life.
I don’t wear sweaters and slacks and gold watches anymore. I fit in just fine everywhere I go, and part of that is you showed me how to be exactly myself, how to wear my own skin and not wish it were someone else’s. I don’t sleep in hotels much these days, but when I do, I close the curtains very tightly, the blackout parts first, then the sheer sliders. I close my eyes, and I think about the smell of that room, and I think about using that fake ID to get margaritas with you before the Padres game, where we took our last ever picture together. When I run out of tears, I throw open the curtains and I see the Pacific stretching out before me until the earth curves away. I see the boats, coming in to safe harbor. I hear the sounds of the city. I hear you snoring as I check your pulse. I look out and watch it all happening, the closest thing I have to time travel. The ocean is impossibly deep and blue.
Con
P.S. That waitress totally knew I was using a fake ID.
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Words by Connor Koch
Images by Mitchell Quiring
Trip Planning by Jonny Morsicato